Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

British, Modern restaurant in Cambridge

Stop Press!

Harden's
survey result

Summary

“Quirky” and “fun” gastroboozer – inspired by early Victorian pubs (and set in a house where EM Forster once lived) – which serves “great beer” and food that’s “adequate in a city not blessed with a lot of high quality alternatives”. Founded in 2014, it has spawned offshoots in Oxford and Birmingham.

Price

£43

£

Food

3

Good

Service

3

Good

Ambience

3

Good

* Based on a three course dinner, half a bottle of wine, coffee, cover charge, service and VAT.

Summary

“Fun, with decent food and a really good selection of beers” (and gins) – this gastropub three-year-old makes an excellent destination in a gaggle of mates. But when it’s busy, don’t expect top service – it can turn “manic, with everything seeming rushed and frantic”. “The bar snacks are lovely though if you can’t get a table” (“Scotch eggs to die for”). Cute garden too.

Price

£48

££

Food

3

Good

Service

2

Average

Ambience

3

Good

* Based on a three course dinner, half a bottle of wine, coffee, cover charge, service and VAT.

Summary

“An enviable range of ales and gins” adds vim to this “fun and fairly priced” gastropub two-year-old – an “energetic and welcoming” hang-out, serving “simple but excellent” cooking. When busy, though, it can be “super noisy and super slow”.

Price

£44

£

Food

3

Good

Service

2

Average

Ambience

3

Good

* Based on a three course dinner, half a bottle of wine, coffee, cover charge, service and VAT.

* Based on a three course dinner, half a bottle of wine, coffee, cover charge, service and VAT.

For 28 years we've been curating reviews of the UK's most notable restaurant. This year diners have submitted over 50,000 reviews to create the most authoritative restaurant guide in the UK.

Have you eaten at Pint Shop?

Owner's description

Pint Shop is all about creating a place that embraces eating and drinking equally. A place where you feely equally at home having a few beers, a light lunch or a full blown feast. A place where people from all walks of life, rub shoulders with each other.

Our inspiration for Pint Shop came from the Beer Houses of the 1830’s;

The original ‘Beer Houses’ or ‘Tom and Jerry Shops’ as they became known, are viewed by many as the birth place of today’s pub. At this point in time beer was a rich man’s drink because of its high tax levels. The poor drank gin and lots of it, mostly in illegal gin shops. Then in 1830, in an attempt to reduce public drunkenness, improve the health of the nation and encourage free trade, The Beer Act was passed. The act allowed anyone that paid a small fee to brew beer and sell it in their home, Beer Houses were born. It even allowed a low ABV beer, called Table Beer to be brewed for children, women and servants as the tap water was so unsafe! A new generation of beer drinkers were born.

We want to take the spirit of those original Beer Houses, namely; craft beer, intimacy & fun, throw in some killer food, cooked on coals, just as it was 1830 and deliver it with a bunch of amazing people.